Thursday, 27 March 2014

"I love you right up to the moon – and back." The story of Little and
Big Nutbrown Hares’ efforts to express their love for each other has
become a bestselling classic, and is a firm favourite with children aged 0-5 years.

Different kinds of animals say hello in their own way. Some say it LOUD – Bow-wow! Some say it PROUD – Meow! And some say it SILLY – Hee-haw!Say Hello Like This
is an ideal read-aloud for the very youngest of listeners. Have fun making all the different animal
sounds that are sure to have babies and toddlers gurgling, giggling,
clapping hands and making plenty more of their own noises, too!

In this gorgeous picture book, Jessica Spanyol captures the wonderful bond between a mother and a
child. Told from the perspective of a small bear, this book encapsulates
how love is measured in a child's mind: a gesture so simple can mean so
very much. Perfect for children 0-5 years.

From buzzing markets to beautiful patisseries, illustrator Salvatore Rubbino takes us on a journey through the making of his new book, A Walk in Paris, in an exclusive guest blog post for Picture Book Party...

I love to look.

And drawing helps me to notice things that I may otherwise
have overlooked.

A Walk in Paris is the third ‘city book’ (A Walk in NewYork followed by A Walk in London are the other two). The book is the story of
a day in Paris but is also a guide through the city. In fact, one of the first
tasks was to plan a walking route of no more that 4 miles so that a family
could cover this distance in a day if they were lucking enough to visit Paris.
It was a case of finding a way to join up all the places I liked. Some places
and landmarks I could include whilst others proved too far away (although I
managed to include them in the view from Notre Dame instead).

In the book, a girl and her granddad walk the journey I
plotted. I identified with the granddad because like me he enjoys a good market
and is tempted by delicious cakes.

Paris is a visual feast, it delights the eyes and lifts the
soul. There is a beautiful view everywhere you look! Even so, I tried hard to
find different ways to describe familiar landmarks and Paris motifs. The things
that interest me are the moments that remind me about life – like when the
characters from the story get lost in the district called the Marais (that
happened to me) or when the girl in the book looks at the cakes through a
patisserie window (I did that a lot too). These moments and others attempt to
describe how it feels like to experience Paris and it’s daily rhythms.

I like to play with the pacing of pictures through the book
and have included a fold out page to create a very different effect towards the
end. I joked that the fold out could reveal a very long baguette for a while
but it was clear early on that there was only one choice – the Eiffel Tower. At
night the Eiffel Tower fizzes with lights and is the most wonderful spectacle.
And my son also made a picture of it for the last page but was shrewd enough to
ask me for a fee – now there’s someone who’s going places!

Monday, 24 March 2014

To celebrate the publication of Shh! We Have a Plan by Chris Haughton, we invite you all to try your hand at designing and making a bird of your own – using this brilliant activity sheet that Chris made!This is great fun to do either at home over the holidays or at school.

Friday, 14 March 2014

This week the main word you'll hear around Walker HQ is "Shh!" - not because we're a noisy bunch, but because we're all buzzing with excitement about Chris Haughton's brand new, beautiful picture book, Shh! We Have a Plan.

We kicked off the celebrations in style with an "Ink and Drink" event at The Museum of Childhood, where everyone put their creative hats on and took part in a big draw, involving lots of squirrels, witches and dragons!

The No Plan Tourhas taken Chris all around the country, from Seven Stories in Newcastle, to Silverdell Books, Preston; Leeds Met University; the Pop Up Festival in Hackney; Birmingham New Central Library; West End Lane Books, London. And next week Chris will be visiting Ireland, holding events at Riverside Arts Centre, Co. Kildare; an Eason’s Event in Dublin in association with Elev8 on RTE Kids; Hodges Figgis, and an appearance on Ireland AM on Thursday!

WIN

We have a signed copy of Shh! We Have a Planup for grabs, plus a signed limited edition print! To be in with a chance of winning, just fill out your details below before 30th March. Good luck!

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Thursday, 6 March 2014

To celebrate World Book Day at Walker HQ, we couldn't resist getting dressed up as our favourite Walker Books characters. The Walker Bear was joined by Maisy, Alex Rider, Total (Timmy Failure's impressively lazy polar bear business partner) and three Wally watchers!

Monday, 3 March 2014

Picture book lovers stand by, design aficionados stay tuned. This month we have the book that we know you have all been waiting for...the BRAND NEW picture book from one of the most exciting voices in children's literature, Chris Haughton. There was a stunning GREEN cover for A Bit Lost, an eye-catching ORANGE for Oh No, George! and now you can add a vibrant BLUE book to your Chris Haughton collection! Here Chris tells us all about the making of his latest book, Shh! We Have a Plan

One of the things I have been trying with my books is to tell stories as
much as possible through images rather than through words. If the story
can be read without language, it should have the ability to be
understood by the very young. I would like to think all my books are
told in a way that someone without language could understand but I think
the story in this book could be the most visual of the three, it
certainly has the least text. In fact, the total word count is only 103,
and ten of those words are ‘shh!’ which I am not sure is a word but I
counted it anyway, I even counted the five words of the title which is a
trick i picked up at school. It is a bit embarrassing then, that it
took more than 2 years to write. I worked out on average I wrote one
word every six days. Not exactly the writing speed most writers aim for…
anyhow…

I started sketching out ideas for this book thinking there must be
some way of making a ‘chase/catch’ type book. It brought me around to
thinking of the Road Runner cartoons where there there are elaborate
plans which could all work very well visually. Quite suddenly three goon
type characters trying to trap a bird popped into my head, that it
would be great if there were three, each with a different plan. What I
liked the best was there could be a drawn out pantomime effect, similar
to A Bit Lost and Oh No, George!, with an anticipatory page turn between
‘ready/steady’ where the three position themselves to catch the bird and
GO! ..where of course they miss.

Finding the ending was easy as I had sort of come up with it in the
beginning (!) the really tricky part was fitting the ending into the
story. I originally had three other ‘good’ characters who were feeding
the birds instead but it seemed very abrupt to introduce them midway. It
seemed best to have a character with the answer the whole way through. The
book seemed a little clunky and wordy when mocked up with four/five
characters on every page, so together with my art director, Deirdre, we
hit on the idea of a conversation happening across a page. There was
lots of comic potential with this, I really loved working on it. If you
think of books like Martin Waddel’s ‘Owl Babies’ it makes use of a
repeated conversation across the page, each character repeats the same
thing, over and over again. It is predictable but also has a pantomime
effect and great for doing silly voices. We had so many great lines we
had to work on editing it down and in fact I think there is enough
material for another picture book in there if we are lucky.

For my other two books, i am always asked if I used paper cut, as
they look quite like it, but in fact I did not use paper cut at all when
creating the artwork and it was all pencil and digital. For this one
though because it had five characters on each page it needed some sort
of drastic simplification for it to be read clearly. Not only that but I
was keen for the conversations to read across the page, matching each
line with the action of the character. There was so much shifting of
compositions around on the pages that it became clear the best way to
compose each page was by collage. In fact it made perfect sense to
create a mainly silhouette image from paper cut and in fact the design
of the birds also benefitted from it too.

For the final artwork I was keen that that the bird seems somehow from
another world, brightly coloured and abstracted and removed from the
world of the characters, it focuses all our attention on the relatively
tiny bird on the page, leads the reader through the pages of the book
and gives a punch of colour at the end. My other books are very
colourful so it was quite satisfying to try to work almost entirely in
silhouette for this one. In fact there was a lot of really interesting
experiments with the colour. Usually full colour printing is in CMYK,
but the whole of the book is printed in only CMK (blue, magenta, black)
and the only yellow that appears in the book at all is in the colour of
the birds. It was our hope that with this approach the bird would stand
out completely from the rest of the book.

I am hugely indebted to my art director and editors, Deirdre McDermott and David Lloyd at Walker books for
all their feedback and help on this book. It improved immeasurably with
their help and I consider myself very lucky to be working with them.